The Guardian profile: Lady Brenda Hale

The new - and youngest - law lord is a self-confessed feminist, a breaker of tradition by taking an unusual route to the top and a totemic hate figure for the Daily Mail, which accuses her of subverting family values

These are unsettling times for the law lords, the 12 judges who make up Britain's highest court. The radical lord chancellor, Charlie Falconer, is hell-bent on turning them out of the Palace of Westminster and setting them up as the country's first supreme court by the end of the year, even though he has not yet found a new home for them.

And to top it all, next Monday the first woman to join their ranks - a self-confessed feminist who has declared that she wants "to see changes in the way society is organised, rather than wanting women to conform to male-determined roles" - takes up her post.

Brenda Hale will be just one of 12, but she represents a whirlwind of change for a body preserved for decades as one of the most homogeneous organs of the British establishment. Not only will she be the youngest law lord, at 59 this month, she will be the first ever to have given birth and juggled the demands of work and childcare.

An academic who spent 18 years teaching law at Manchester University, she has not come up through the traditional route of years at practice at the bar. And she will be the first family lawyer in many years to sit in the court - top judges have traditionally emerged from the more 'heavyweight' areas of commercial and chancery law.

She also brings a knowledge rare among judges of the workings of Whitehall and the ins and outs of the legislative process from her 10 years on the Law Commission, including five years working closely with officials from two departments on the gestation of the ground-breaking Children Act.

It was at the Law Commission, the reform quango, that Hale first became a totemic hate figure for the Daily Mail. From 1984 until she was appointed a high court judge in 1994 she presided over a far-reaching revamp of family law which included no-fault divorce - later so savaged in the parliamentary process that it became unworkable and was jettisoned by the last lord chancellor, Derry Irvine - and the right of unmarried victims of domestic violence to stay in their homes.

In a vitriolic attack the Mail dubbed Hale - then known as Brenda Hoggett from her marriage to her first husband, the Manchester QC John Hoggett - and her four fellow law commissioners "legal commissars subverting family values". It went on to note that she had married a fellow law commissioner, Julian Farrand, only nine days after her divorce and 10 days after his. A draft bill for which she was responsible, on decision-making for mentally incapacitated people, was wrongly portrayed by the tabloid as advocating legalised euthanasia and organ-snatching.

The Mail was back on the attack when her appointment as the first woman law lord was announced in October, demonising her as a "hardline feminist" whose appointment "epitomises the moral vacuum within our judiciary and wider establishment".

Hale's friends are bemused by the coldly logical, doctrinaire and supercilious persona painted by the Mail and its distance from the reality. "Brenda is an absolutely straightforward, completely honest and principled person," said the Labour peer Helena Kennedy QC. "This idea of a man-hating feminist is wrong. She's extraordinarily human, by no means anti-male and great fun. I've always found her a wonderful, companionable person."

Hale admits being a "softline" feminist who believes in equality for men and women. Growing up in Yorkshire, one of three daughters of a boys' school headteacher and a mother who later became head of a primary school, she couldn't help noticing that there were only half as many grammar school places for girls as for boys. At Cambridge, where she took a starred first and was top of her class, the women's colleges supplied only six of the more than 100 law students: in effect a quota on women.

In 1966, after graduation, she joined the Manchester University law faculty as a junior lecturer. While teaching she studied for the bar exams, winning the top results for her year in the bar finals. She initially managed to combine teaching with work at the bar until, required to choose between the two, she opted for academe. The person who forced her to make the choice was Julian Farrand, dean of the law faculty.

She and Farrand, both then married to others, moved to the Law Commission in London at the same time in 1984. Their relationship developed later: in 1994 she told a legal journal that she and her first husband " grew apart" when she went south with their daughter Julia, then aged 11 and now a 30-year-old merchant banker.

Farrand, she added, "likes to say it took 20 years to fall in love at first sight". Both went through amicable divorces which were finalised just before they married in 1992. Nine years her senior, Farrand went on to become the pensions ombudsman and insurance ombudsman, and to write a farcical novel Love at All Risks, the confessions of an insurance ombudsman who has "a passionate adulterous affair" with his "stunning assistant".

The couple remain "immensely solid and happy together", according to Mavis Maclean of the Oxford University centre for family law and policy, who has known Hale for 30 years. Both were working mothers in the 70s, when they were among a group of academics who looked at law for the first time in the context of society and how the laws impacted on women's lives.

The influential 1984 book Women and the Law, the first comprehensive survey of women's rights at work, in the family and in the state, which Hale wrote with a fellow academic, concluded: "Deep-rooted problems of inequality persist and the law continues to reflect the economic, social and political dominance of men."

On the bench Hale has criticised the inbuilt bias of the current system for choosing judges, with its dependence on "soundings" from those already there, producing a judiciary which is "not only mainly male, overwhelmingly white, but also largely the product of a limited range of educational institutions and social backgrounds".

On one occasion,"deeply affronted", she refused to withdraw with the women after a dinner at the lodgings where judges stay on circuit, because she felt it was "quite insulting" to the female junior barrister who was a guest.

Male judges, she remarked last October, were "very welcoming, very friendly, lovely people to work with. The only comment one would make is that they tend to be of an age and background where they have very rarely had a woman as an equal colleague as opposed to a secretary, clerk or whatever. So they are sometimes nonplussed".

All agree she is formidably clever, with a wide knowledge of the law, yet one retired law lord confided: "She's a bloody awful judge, you know." Another judge reckoned that while she had not been a particularly good judge in the high court, she had performed well in the court of appeal.

Sir Thomas Legg, who was permanent secretary at the lord chancellor's department when Hale was first appointed to the high court in 1994, says the latter comment has been repeated about "quite a few distinguished judges over the ages". He attributes such remarks not so much to gender bias as to most judges' firm belief that only those who have spent years toiling as courtroom advocates can make good judges, at least below the appeal court level.

Legg acknowledged that Hale's gender was a factor in helping her reach the top court, but added: "She would have got there on merit. She's a very able person with a particularly clear intelligence. Her ability has always shone out."

Jane Hoyal, a family law barrister and chairwoman of the association of women barristers - of which Hale is president - has observed her on the bench since she was a part-time deputy high court judge. "What was outstanding was her empathy with clients."

Andrew Burrows, now a law professor at Oxford University and a junior colleague of Hale's at Manchester in the 80s, says: "Her judgments are basically good and always interesting to read. She was always fantastic to talk law to because she was always so clear in her thinking." He also praises, as do others who have worked with her, her willingness to encourage younger colleagues.

"She's moved the law on for the benefit of children quite significantly, particularly in the area of human rights, about which she appears to feel deeply," said child law expert Allan Levy QC.

In the new era of the supreme court, Hale's broader background will be a great asset, argues Peter Graham Harris, a former senior civil servant in the lord chancellor's department who worked with her on the Children Act. "The great thing is her academic background which allows her to see things in broader social policy terms, and her experience in Whitehall," he said. "All that is going to be very important to the senior judiciary because they're going to play a much larger part in the governance of the nation."